15 kg of waste and a pallet collected on the beach of Honfleur in 2 hours: that’s what our Verlinde teams picked up during our Eco-citizen day organised last autumn.

At Verlinde, we chose to raise awareness among our employees about environmental preservation by organising a citizens’ day focused on beach pollution. Accompanied by the associations Normandie Challenge and Rivages Propres, some twenty volunteers discovered the local ecosystem and how to preserve it. Before proceeding, with the appropriate equipment, to clean the beach.

Michele Lapouge, organiser of the day, explains: “The speakers took us on a tour of Honfleur’s beach and showed us details that we are generally unfamiliar with or do not notice, such as whelk spawning grounds, sand worm marks, ray or bird eggs, and shellfish, some of which, attached to the hulls of ships, come to us from overseas and modify our ecosystem. They gave us details of the different sources of pollution, some of which become embedded in the food chain. Then everyone got involved in the collection game, and the size of the harvest convinced even the most sceptical of the usefulness of this approach.”
She adds: “This awareness day is a first step for Verlinde. In view of the general enthusiasm, we asked each participant to share an idea for a future day focused on ecology. We hope to get even more people involved.”